Friday, August 31, 2007

Working class poetry heroes

Ok, enough eggheady stuff for the moment, and on to two blog pieces that I think compliment each other well, though they're each quite different. They address the matter of who the heck poets are and think they are: what do they do, what do the think they're doing... and what do they do for a living? Writing as a craft or art has been so reified that maybe it's in some danger of getting itself detached from what used to be called, when we were human, the Human Condition.

Reginald Shepherd's "Working Class Hero" is a bitter outcry, worth reading as a reminder of the distance between earned experience and every book, blog, and review. Here's a sample:

"I know that there are many smart and talented young people in the ghettos who haven't have the luck I had, the opportunities, or just a mother determined that they would be something more than a statistic, but I also know that sometimes the system that puts one in one's place and keeps one there with an iron-toed boot pressed down on one's throat can be circumvented, though hardly defeated. Indeed, if one doesn't come from privilege, one has no choice but to circumvent that system if one wants to breathe at all, and I have always insisted on drawing on my own breath. I am living proof of both the possibility and the precariousness of such an escape. I was not meant to survive this world. Many people have tried to crush me, sometimes with the best of intentions, as I know they have crushed others who have refused to know their place. I consider my survival a form of victory, however tenuous and conditional."

Robert Archambeau's "The Poet as Specialist" on his samizdat blog, addresses the specializing and professionalizing of modern life, poets included. Its great opening line is that "Sir Walter Ralegh was not a poet." He elaborates that today, for example, in academic departments, "most poets seem to look at the writing of poetry not as an activity but as the basis for an identity. The act of writing poems comes with a whole set of associated behaviors and attitudes (elements of bohemianism, eccentricity, spontaneity, etc.) most of them inherited from the history of how poets have lived over the past century and a half or so. [...] Poetry writing people, generally speaking, have come to internalize the notion that poetry isn't something they do, it's something that constitutes who they are." Of course, it wasn't always this way: "Walter Raleigh would have been a bit freaked out."

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DON SHARE

"Don Share is a poet and polymath extraordinaire and a great gift to the literary scene at large." - Aram Saroyan

About Wishbone (from Black Sparrow): "The most soulful book I've read in a long, long time." - Alice Fulton

"Don Share's work is compressed as a haiku, intent as a tanka, witty as a sonnet, witless as a song, relentless as an expose, patter without pretension...his elegant poetry, exposed as a haiku, expansive as a renga, boisterous as a bridge, happy as Delmore Schwartz with Lou Reed and vice versa, vivacious as the living day, sustained like a whole note, clipped as a grace note, loving various and shrewd as a thingist, soapy as Ponge, delightful as light, dedefining as a new rite, built out of attention, music and sight." - David Shapiro

"Squandermania is a book of associative delight, even when the poems are at their most grave. They combine the obliquity of Mina Loy, the incantatory freshness of Roethke, and even Plath’s devotion to nursery rhyme to leaven the book’s prevailing tones of irony, sorrow, and regret. The poet’s awareness of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness. And yet the poet keeps faith with language by allowing language to drive the poems, even as the poet’s occasions and subject matter are grounded in what Hopkins called 'the in-earnestness of speech.'" - Tom Sleigh

About Union: "Few poets manage such dexterous and fresh music. Few books are as lovely or profound." - Alice Fulton

"Brimming with heart and intelligence... confirmation of Don Share’s stature in American letters. Evidenced by a return to his debut collection, he’s been at the summit from the beginning." - William Wright, Oxford American

"Don Share's earnest, moving first volume, Union, represents the promising next stage in so-called Southern narrative poetry. Share writes clear, well-crafted page-long poems about romance, memory and separation ("our house tocks and ticks/ like an inherited clock whose hour hand sticks"). He may, however, achieve greater recognition for longer work (like "Pax Americana") in which his own stories join those of Memphis, Tennessee and of the Civil War's difficult, lingering guilt: "Where the United States ends/ and begins// The Mississippi is/ a long American wound." - Publishers Weekly

"I delight in the precision of these chiseled poems and in the sizeable, important ambition of Share's imagination." - David Baker

"Union is a tour de force, establishing Share’s credentials as well as his poetic voice." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"... something special. I hadn't known his poetry at all; it is brilliant." - Eric Ormsby

"The poetry of Don Share expresses many tensions between Memphis past and Memphis present, much like the novels and short stories of Peter Taylor." - Wanda Rushing, Memphis and the Paradox of Place: Globalization in the American South

About Miguel Hernandez: "There is a sense of shared elation between reader and translator that confirms the delight of exact sensation when the poems feel transmitted by that cautious and subtle alchemy that is the translator's skill. I have felt this with Don Share's versions of Miguel Hernandez: but this is also because he is a fine poet in his own right, one who surrenders his sensibilities to the task of transference." - Derek Walcott

"Share manages to make Hernández-in-English dazzle, bringing readers closer to the poet's sense of language and meaning." - Huffington Post

About Bunting's Persia: Guardian Book of the Year, 2012 and Paris Review staff pick!

"Both the publishing house and the book’s editor Don Share have done an excellent job: a slim and attractive book, a chronological poet-by-poet running order, and a fine introduction by Share, full of details about Bunting’s curious life." - Bookslut

"I read it on Valentine’s Day." - Lorin Stein

"Virtuoso writing by any standard... deserves to be famous." - The Hudson Review

"Bunting's Persia is a delight..." - Alastair Johnston, Booktryst

About The Traumatophile: "Trenchant, smart-ass, broken-hearted, hantée, swoony, maudlin, mordant, sinister, gloomy, goofy, eyes open and counting every penny, these are. And inspiring. How many poems can you say that about, anymore?" - The Unreliable Narrator blog